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BCC continues to sort out senior transit woes

By Wesley LeBlanc
Posted 1/23/19

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – As Aging True gets most aspects of Clay County senior services under control, transportation still remains a sore spot for residents needing to get to doctor appointments and …

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BCC continues to sort out senior transit woes


Posted

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – As Aging True gets most aspects of Clay County senior services under control, transportation still remains a sore spot for residents needing to get to doctor appointments and other trips.

Back in December, Jacksonville-based ElderSource, an agency that provides funding to the Clay Council on Aging, announced it would contract with Jacksonville-based Aging True to handle senior services starting Jan. 1. While it’s only been a few weeks, Aging True’s CEO Terri Barton provided an update to the Board of County Commissioner at its Jan. 22 meeting.

“We’ve accomplished four things,” Barton said. “We’ve transitioned staff. We managed to transition 50 people who were staff on Council on Aging. We are in the process of engaging with 28 different providers...we’ve also executed new leases for the property with the county as well as with JTA and we are continuing the process of separating the Gordian knot that is [information technology] between what is now JTA and Aging True [information technology].”

Barton also said Aging True is in the process of applying for all of the appropriate and necessary licenses. The biggest license is the Change of Ownership license that is now necessary following ElderSource’s drop of the Council on Aging and their contract of services with Aging True.

Despite all these advances since the new contract, Barton reiterated that transportation is still the biggest challenge they face.

“Because of the way it was divided, we received no transportation dollars,” Barton said. “We received only those funds that were the federal and… the matching funds for those dollars that paid for Clay County Council on Aging, so that leaves us with those dollars to continue the programs and we can do all of that with the exception of transportation. It has to be vendored.”

The price Barton said she received from the Jacksonville Transportation Authority would see each trip cost $30, but Barton said this number is for roundtrip transportation. She also said this would cover individual transportation – pick an individual up from their home and take them to a destination – which is why the price is so high.

According to Barton, the most pressing destinations right now are the two adult daycare centers, which a lot of Clay County citizens rely on to take care of elderly family members.

“If we engaged that contract, that would require us to have an additional minimum $156,000 a year and possibly as much as $200,000 a year,” Barton said. “Nowhere in the dollars we have does that money exist so that means that I’m in a real dilemma.”

Barton said she is looking for other providers who can offer a more manageable price, but thinks this transportation problem needs to be solved as soon as possible.

“While we could possibly squeeze [the budget to cover these prices]...doing so would be at the expense of something else in the budget,” Barton said.

Shortly after Barton’s update, JTA Vice President and Chief Transportation Officer Lisa Darnall provided commissioners with an update as well.

“We started running transportation disadvantaged services on Jan. 2,” Darnall said. “We do have funding from the state. I know Clay County is providing the 10 percent match. We are providing about 110 trips per day, currently six days a week and we certainly wanted to make sure that those life-sustaining trips and those medical trips were taken care of so there wasn’t any break in service for Clay County for those trips.”

Darnall said the next step is looking at other kinds of services that JTA could provide and that she will be going to her board next week with the agreement from Clay County as well as a funding agreement from the Florida Department of Transportation. Once the board approves those agreements, it will allow JTA to start two of the flex routes that were previously provided in Clay County.

According to Darnall, JTA does have 100 percent of the funding from FDOT for the flex route services and it will be good until roughly September. She said that work is being done to extend that funding and that she feels comfortable in saying that they will likely begin those routes in February.

“Concerning the Aging True service, we also have a group rate that we offered to Aging True and as long as we have five or more [people] going to the same senior center, that’s a group rate of $14.45 a trip,” Darnall said. “So, the individual trips are costly, but there are some opportunities to provide group trips to the senior centers and that might help with what Aging True is trying to do moving forward.”

Following Darnall’s discussion, the BCC didn’t have any questions and approved an agreement Darnall previously presented to the board. The agreement was approved 5-0.